E*Rock Friday, May 27

The future is electronic. And dark. And kind of funny.

IMAGE: Daniel Peterson

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[COMPUTER LOVE] When I arrive at the home of one of the
Portland electronic music scene’s most important figures of the past
decade, Eric Mast—better known by his pseudonym, E*Rock—he’s deep into
rehearsals for the release show for his latest electronic epic, The Clock & the Mountain. So deep, in fact, that he doesn’t hear me when I knock on the door.

Finally, his
housemate lets me in. “I was zoning out, messing around with some
beats,” the lanky Mast says, sporting a dazed expression from behind his
long, curly black hair. “I haven’t played live in a while, so I’m
trying to figure out how to play my new stuff.”

Mast hasn’t had a new album to support since his 2003 full-length, Conscious.
Not that he has been slacking. Over the past eight years, he has
released a handful of limited-edition CD-Rs and DVD-Rs and flexed his
muscles as a remixer for the likes of Ratatat (the New York City band
that features Mast’s younger brother, Evan), Joey Casio and Dragging an
Ox Through Water.

But mostly, Mast has
been focused on his visual art. He’s an accomplished artist who
specializes in semi-abstract, almost cartoonlike paintings and drawings à
la Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mast is also renowned for his animation and
video pieces (he recently spent a week in New York providing live video
accompaniment for a performance featuring Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah
Yeahs and former Black Dice member Hisham Bharoocha).

Add his frequent DJ
gigs and it’s little wonder Mast hasn’t had much time to make another
grand sonic statement. But to hear him say it, there was a bit of
self-doubt in the mix as well.

“When my brother and I
first started getting into composing using computers,” he says between
bites of an apple in his bedroom/studio, “we got so excited at the
possibilities that we just made stuff. Now, I wasn’t sure what I wanted
to make. And I didn’t know who I was making it for. It’s not dance
music. It’s not headphone music. Would my friends even listen to this?”

That’s where Mast is wrong. The songs on The Clock
sounds like they would work as well in a club as they do in a pair of
headphones. It’s a spongy record that bounces with tropical bass and
electro beats; long, groaning melodies inspired by ’70s German synth
pioneers, and a touch of hip-hop swagger. And as light as the new record
gets on songs like the squeaky, theremin-heavy “Higher Hats” and the
appropriately titled “LazerQuest,” with its blasts of video-gamelike
sound effects, the record has an astringent aftertaste of darkness,
something Mast cops to immediately.

“It
was recorded in the winter, when I was holed up reading Philip K. Dick
and William Gibson, so there’s a real dark sci-fi theme going on there,”
Mast says. He emphasizes this on the record by including in the insert a
small bit of text written by one of Mast’s friends, sci-fi writer Mark
von Schlegell (it begins: “Imagine a dark sphere that is all the time
and space in the universe”).

But the album’s
biggest leitmotif resides in its title. “It’s in reference to spending
so much time on the record, and the mountain was that I needed to have
this big, weighty project done,” he says. “In the end, I just had to sit
down and have a good time and play around with beats and melodies and
not worry about the big picture.”

SEE IT: E*Rock releases The Clock & the Mountain on Friday, May 27, at Rotture. 9 pm. $5. 21+.